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DELAWARE, Ohio — Craig Johnson, one of the owners of Amato’s Woodfired Pizza in downtown
Delaware, likes his pizza made from scratch.

Amato’s doesn’t use store-bought salad dressings or pizza sauce on the restaurant’s pies — good
for your taste buds, but tough if you’re trying to figure out which option has the fewest calories
or grams of fat. And analyzing the recipes is costly and time-consuming, Johnson said, making it
tough for a small business like his to provide nutritional information to its customers.

Enter the Delaware General Health District, which this year started a program to help local
restaurants figure out how many calories and grams of fat are in their dishes.

The department’s DGHD on the Menu program, so far in five Delaware County restaurants,
calculated calories, fat and saturated fat for the dishes at each restaurant, including Amato’s,
and gave each restaurant a list of “healthy” choices. To qualify as healthy, a dish had to have
fewer than 750 calories, 30 grams of fat and 15 grams of saturated fat.

At Amato’s, 11 pizzas qualify, and all but one are vegetarian. Its chicken salad sandwich and
chicken sandwich also made the health district’s list of healthy options.

“As a restaurant owner, you get these questions a lot (about how many calories are in a dish),”
Johnson said. “That’s a hard undertaking for a small business to swallow, to get your food
analyzed. That was a service that I would have had to pay for. They did it for free.”

The health district offered the program to help people in Delaware County make healthier choices
about what they eat in an effort to reduce obesity, said Traci Whittaker, a spokeswoman for the
district. The menu items that made the health cut are on special menus at each restaurant.

Health-district dietitians used software to analyze the ingredients in each menu item and
calculate the nutritional value. Whittaker said the district hopes to offer to calculate
nutritional information for other restaurants in the spring.

Bob Sullivan-Neer, general manager at the Delaware Community Market, a nonprofit grocery store
that also has a deli, said having the market’s lunch menu analyzed was a no-brainer.

“Why not?” he said. “They decided which things they thought were the most-healthy from our menu,
and it’s a nice breakdown.”

Ultimately, Johnson said, it’s up to the customers to make the best decision for them.

“It’s still common sense,” he said. “If french fries make you fat, and you don’t want to be fat,
don’t eat french fries. I didn’t mean that to sound as crude as it did, but it’s common sense.”